The present research project investigates the role of self-awareness in alcohol related behaviors. The experimental alcohol literature is briefly reviewed and it is concluded that a model of alcohol use based on the premise that alcohol lowers the individual's level of self-awareness can unify several disparate areas of alcohol research. The impact of alcohol on cognition; its effects on social behaviors; and the sources of the motive to drink. It is specifically hypothesized that alcohol reduces self-awareness and as such interferes with the encoding of self-relevant information; that because of its influence on encoding processes alcohol reduces the individual's sensitivity to social cues regarding appropriate forms of social behavior; and that alcohol is often consumed for its awareness debilitating functions following personal failure. Separate experiments are designed to test each of these hypotheses. Experimental 1 assesses the impact of alcohol on encoding processes of individual's high and low in dispositional self-awareness within a depth-of-encoding paradigm. Experiment 2 measures alcohol consumption as a function of manipulated success and failure at an experimental task, situational self-awareness, and dispositional self-awareness. Experiment 3 assesses the joint impact of alcohol and a situational manipulation of self-awareness on responsivity to manipulate social cues regarding the appropriateness of cooperation and competition in a Prisoner's Dilema Game. Each experiment thus bears on a different aspect of the proposed theoretical position.